Given that I’m still only a beginner when it comes to reading in Japanese, I mostly discover things via recommendations from people on these forums, mostly through bookclubs and the REDC threads.
But I also often pick things to read based on it being at about my level according to https://learnnatively.com/
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I ask my friends they usually recommend me some good books.
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My main method really is buying books by authors whose work I’ve read before. The ten books in the amazon order that arrived today are all “read their other work”, in fact. It’s the most reliable way I’ve found of picking books that are at a difficulty level I know I’ll be happy with and that I’ll enjoy reading. It does have the disadvantage of being a bit narrow, of course, so sometimes I’ll branch out a bit with other approaches:
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A few years back I went through a phase of trying books that sounded good from the backlists of SF Taisho and Seiun award winners (those are Japan’s two main SF genre prizes, similar to the Hugo and Nebula awards). This took a little research when I was buying books to find summaries or reviews to see if I’d like them, so it’s a lot more effort than “add another book by an old favourite to the cart”. A bit hit and miss, but on the other hand it’s how I found the book I’d probably rate my absolute favourite of everything I’ve read in Japanese ( 新世界より by 貴志祐介).
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If I’m lucky enough to be in a physical Japanese bookshop I’ll browse, just because I like the experience of browsing. Sometimes a cover catches my eye, or the bookshop employees write up little cards introducing books they like. Second-hand bookshops are even better because the cost of picking up a dud is so low…
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Everything else is fairly low on the list: recommendations, books for series where I liked the anime, Serious Literature by famous authors, looking at what amazon suggests people who like the authors I do also bought, etc.
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I recently found a YouTuber who talks about shoujo manga and that sparked my interest in reading manga again. When I last read manga books physically was over a decade ago and it was in English of course. This time I want to read manga in Japanese so I ordered a few books in Japanese even though I know I’ll only be able to understand a little bit.
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This is why I read 三四郎 (夏目漱石) – it was discussed and quoted in 日本語が亡びるとき: 英語の世紀の中で (水村美苗). The latter is an interesting bit of non-fiction that’s not as silly as the clickbaity title might suggest. I disagreed with the author’s argument in the end but it was persuasive enough along the way about some of its subarguments to make me moderate my previous linguistics-based “spoken language is primary” views a bit. The former is Serious Literature but not too difficult to read as literature goes; and the setting (late Meiji era university students) is one I find fascinating. Read a version with modern footnotes to help with the literary references, though about half of them are to the Western canon.
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I decided to re-post my reply from the other thread, too but I’ve edited it.
In Japanese, I use anime to decide. I’m still a beginner so focussing on books with plots that I know in English is easier for me.
In English, I just go by whatever I’m in the mood to read and choose from my huge collection of books that I’ve bought for free or at a very low price. If that fails, then I go to my favourite authors and either re-read their series and read the latest book by them.
Sometimes, I just pick a genre and start looking for books in that genre. That’s how this year I started reading lesbian romance. I’d noticed that my reading had narrowed to a couple of genres- fantasy/science fiction and Japanese YA fantasy so I picked that genre to broaden my reading this year. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. I discovered more light novels (Seirei Gensouki, Invaders of the Rokujouma, Monster Tamer, Tearmoon Empire) and decided to re-read some series that I was collecting in print- (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, The Irregular at Magic High School and So I’m a Spider, So What?)
But my TBR list is long and I have thousands of books collected on my Kindle Cloud in many different genres. Eventually, I hope to get around to reading them. 
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Sometimes it’s pure random chance.
In English, I came across one of my favorite series of all time because the author put up some of the books for free in a LitRPG Facebook group I was in: the Cradle series by Will Wight
And just this month, I immediately preordered the latest book the day it went on sale. It was that good.
In Japanese, I came across a discussion that mentioned 狼と香辛料 while looking up a grammar point and picked it up because it seemed interesting. So far it’s pretty good.
There’s also infamy. That’s the reason I picked up Re:Zero and 回復術士のやり直し. Both seemed to deal with pretty hard subject matter and I wanted to see for myself how they were in Japanese. The latter was free on BookWalker at the time so there’s that, too.
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I’m very torn on that one as well. It’s a really mixed bag. At least one can say that those are popular books, I guess 
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I really enjoy Hontame. The other guy is a real mystery addict.
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There do seem to be an awful lot of Japanese book awards – I feel like practically every author blurb lists two or three they’ve won or placed highly in…
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Some authors even get an award created specifically for them 
(looking at you 森博嗣 )
But of course some awards are more renowned than others, so you could take that into account if you wanted to make a distinction.
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I still haven’t found a good solution for looking for books by association (like, I want to relive the feel I got from reading a certain book, or read something that will make me scared/depressed/happy, or read something taking place in such and such location, or something that includes/excludes children/sex/robots/magic/whatever, etc). Looking around I found a few websites that claim to do that for English books: Whichbook, BookBrowse, LibraryThing, FictionDB. I haven’t tried them in action (as in, trying out the books they suggest) to know how well they work, but they’re something at least.
Does anyone know if there’s something similar in Japanese? A website or something where you can search for books by a very large variety of keywords that aren’t only about genres and age groups?
As an example, I’d like to exclude animal cruelty from anything I read, if possible. If there was a tag for that, it would be easy. But I’m not only talking about content warnings. At this moment I’m looking for something quietly eerie for instance - a slow read with a menacing aura. How would someone go about looking for something like that?
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on Youtube I think I typed in the search bar something like 最近読んだ本 or 本のロコミ or おすすめの本 and just browsed.
Most of what I find on the internet in Japanese is just trial and error with search terms! I highly recommend it. I search a phrase that vaguely gets across what I’m looking for, and then in the results I find the correct terms for it, then search those and find more.
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I was overjoyed when I discovered tsundokureader.com (also posted by @NicoleIsEnough above). I’m still not fluent enough to casually look over Japanese-language book reviews with no effort, so having an English-language site that reviews untranslated Japanese books is awesome.
Today I came across another such blog: https://insidethatjapanesebook.com/
The focus is more on mystery/crime novels, but not exclusively.
I found it in this list of The Top Six Untranslated Japanese Book Review Blogs – Shosetsu.ninja. The other blogs listed are also worth checking out, as is the blog that compiled the list, shosetsu.ninja itself.
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I thought I might post this here as it could be relevant. An email from Bookwalker today has a large selection of discounted books - they look like they’re mostly horror, but it might include mystery as well, I wasn’t sure.
I was wondering
- if anyone was interested in any of these
- if anyone can recommend any of these
I don’t know that any are at my reading level, and not sure I want to read pure horror, but open to suggestions.
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I’m sure some have mystery elements but as an avid mystery fan none looked like mystery novels at a glance and while I didn’t read every one, the only author names I recognized are ones known for horror rather than mystery. Someone more into this genre might be able to recommend some of the ‘lighter’ horror, but I can’t.
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Thanks -I’m not really good enough at reading the descriptions to know, though I did see リング in there - given the (American version of the) film gave the nightmares I probably shouldn’t read it!
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Thanks for sharing! At first glance they all look like horror, not mystery. On the other hand, from my very limited experience, I’m under the impression that Japanese horror is not necessarily super scary. I’ve been in the mood for some light horror lately, so I’ll investigate and let you know of any findings.
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The only straight up horror novel I’ve read was mostly just gorey and cringey, but I feel like @Daisoujou read a short story horror collection that they liked?
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Yeah, Otsuichi’s Zoo was pretty good! A little all over the place, and sometimes not even horror though. The first is definitely better than the second. It’s not a bad read but I don’t think it really fits the kind of horror @omk3 is describing. I’d recommend Goth based on what I’ve heard about it, but I’m pretty sure there’s animal cruelty and I see that’s a no.
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